Well, yes, if only the bully profited. If the war for oil had gone as “planned” then one would think a cheaper flow of oil at market prices would have benefited everyone, even the poorer kids who had to pay more for it.
Of course, it didn’t, and we’re all paying the price at the pump (and elsewhere) as a consequence.
China’s rapid growth is a wild-card I’m not sure anyone could have accurately predicted, but that aside, it still begs the question - would the war have received more, less, or the same level of resistance if the stated goal of “securing the free flow of oil at market prices” had been laid out as the justification up-front, regardless of it’s hindsight failure?
I would tend to agree. If the war had been presented as a struggle to gain control over oil and we as a nation had agreed to that, then I wouldn’t be blaming the government for the war. The blame would be on all of us. Just like it would be unfair to blame just the government for stealing land from the Indians when everyone agreed to it at the time. (Well, except for the Indians obviously.)
Why would the oil be cheaper if the U.S. controlled it? The only difference would be where the profits go, e.g. American contractors and energy companies. Unless you own stock in them or something I don’t see why you would be for spending tons of money and killing people just to redirect the money. The oil ain’t going anywhere different.
Maybe we can imagine some resource war where the government would institute an “America first” policy to keep the economy going, but we’re a long ways off from that.
Because the world is supposed to have moved past all that; ever since WWII ended there has been an international consensus that wars of aggression are not to be tolerated, and national sovereignty is not to be violated without serious provocation. The U.S. fought the Gulf War on that principle ostensibly.
The policy was used to force Haiti out of their claims for an isle, fortunately guano stopped being so great for the US economy once the chemical industry found better ways to make fertilizer and so it was that (A policy that is still in the books AFAIK *) the laws used to justify the takeover of territory for such “valuable stuff” for the USA are not used nowadays.
I would think for most people the loss of life (on both sides) inherent in a war of economic conquest would be a reasonable moral argument against such an action. Especially so if, as seems to be the case with the Iraq war, the only tangible benefit may be, at best, a marginal decrease in the cost of crude oil. Although I personally find repugnant the idea that more than 5000 American troops and more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens might have had to die so we could pay, say, a few cents less per gallon for gasoline, it appears this loss of life is of no concern whatever to the OP. Fair enough; I guess the question he is most interested in is whether the war made economic sense.
According to this Reuters article, by March 2013, the US war on Iraq had cost a total of $1.7 trillion in direct costs, not counting another $490 million in veteran’s benefits. The article goes on to say that total costs over the next few decades may top $6 trillion.
Now, I don’t have near the chops in economics to work out accurately whether this massive expenditure has been offset by an equivalent reduction in market crude prices so forgive me if I’m getting things drastically wrong here. According to this chart from the US Energy Information Agency, from 2008 through 2013 Iraq has accounted for, depending on year, anywhere from about three to about five percent of total US petroleum imports. Taking 2013 as an example, and assuming a (very rough) average of $100/barrel for crude, the total dollar value of imported Iraqi oil for that year appears to have been around $12.4 billion.
Let’s be really generous and say that we might have had to pay twice as much for this 3-5 percent of our imports if the US had never invaded Iraq, so roughly an additional $12.4 billion per year since 2002. That comes out to maybe $132 billion total. So, if I haven’t mucked this up, we spent $1.7 trillion to save $132 billion. Doesn’t sound like value for money to me.
So, I guess we all agree that the war wasn’t about getting cheaper oil for the American people.
That doesn’t mean that oil wasn’t an important target, the benefits were just not meant for the American people.
That was what I was thinking… for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about “No Blood for Oil” and other idiotic slogans, we didn’t actually get any sweetheart oil deals out of the Iraqis, and nor did we really secure anything.
So ultimately, it was not a war for oil, and that makes all the bitching even sillier.
Personally, I think more than anything, it was a big series of fuck-ups and unfortunate events that more or less spiraled out of control. First, it was GWB and Congress deciding to give Saddam Hussein a king-sized smackdown for giving the US the finger about WMDs. Sort of a “Well, if you won’t give us access, we’ll damn well give ourselves access… with armored forces.” type thing.
I don’t really think they really thought he had WMDs; it was more the principle that letting a shitty tin-pot dictator like Saddam Hussein give us the finger like that wasn’t something that we should tolerate or let the rest of the world see.
Once we beat his conventional forces, we didn’t really have a plan and I think they assumed the civil authorities would continue on, much like they did in Germany and other nations in the past. But the Iraqis proved to be particularly wretched in that regard, and the place fell into anarchy and chaos. From that point forward, we couldn’t really pull out in good conscience, so we had the tiger by the tail, and had to try and do something to put the place right.
At no point was it some sort of grab for oil; if we were seriously going to do that, we’d have done better to come up with reasons to go fuck around with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Just as odious as Hussein, but less in the way of culture shock and ingrained hatred, more oil reserves, and closer to home.
But those numbers only matter if you assume the war was being fought for everyone’s benefit. The reality is the cost of the war will be paid by everyone while the rewards of the war have be showered on a few. And as I’ve noted, if you’re an oil company executive then higher oil prices are one of the rewards.
Aye, there’s the rub. The reason it’s awful to go to war for oil is because we’re going to war for oil for the oil barons. Haliburton and the military-industrial complex and the oil companies are the ones who benefit. The US as a whole spends way too much money to make up for the economic gain of the oil.
So US soldiers are dying for the profiteering of wealthy companies and those invested in them. That’s the problem.
Nonsense; all that means is that we failed. We tried to take the oil and they blew up the pipelines. We demanded they hand over the profits from the oil and they refused. Just because a thief fails in his theft, that doesn’t mean he never intended the theft.
It was certainly about oil. It was originally even called OIL (“Operation Iraqi Liberation”), we ignore their armories and supposed WMD labs and everything else to head straight to the Oil Ministry, the Bush Administration even boasted beforehand how profits from the oil would make the war a profitable venture. Cheney was making plans in his “Energy Committee” over maps of Iraqi oil fields before 9-11 even happened. It was always about the oil.
:rolleyes: We deliberately gutted their civil authorities, and refused to let what was left do any rebuilding. This is just more blaming the victim.
We never had any “good conscience”, and we never had any interest in “setting the place right”.
I’m not arguing against that point. The OP’s primary question, however, was “Why is going to war over oil a bad thing?” If it was fought only for the benefit of oil company shareholders (although I think it’s rather more complicated than that), I would say that’s generally a Bad Thing.
If it was a war for oil, we sucked at it from a financial point of view. The war cost several trillion dollars, and Iraq doesn’t produce that much oil to be worth it.
If it was a war for oil, it would’ve been much cheaper and more humane to invest in oil exploration elsewhere like offshore or the tarsands, and invest in renewable transportation technology and less polluting technology (battery powered cars, compressed air powered cars, hydrogen cars, natural gas cars, technology to convert coal into oil, technology to convert natural gas into oil, higher mpg cars, etc). Spending $500 billion on those technologies and investments would’ve reduced our oil demand
If it was a war for oil, it was done really stupidly. We didn’t even monopolize the oil fields, they still sell to the global market as far as I know. In a true empire the oil fields would flow directly to the US. But even with that, at 2 million barrels per day that is about $200 million in revenue a day. It would take years and years for that to make up for the several trillion dollars the war costs since it would take 5,000 days to make a trillion dollars worth of oil. Even if we kept all the oil and made Iraq pay all the maintenance costs for extracting the oil, it would take decades for us to get a good ROI.
However in the early 70s during the oil embargo, the US had plans to invade a middle eastern country to claim the oil. That may have been worth it from a financial POV, but who knows how much worse that would’ve made the terrorism issue for us.
If we wanted a war for oil, we should’ve invaded Kuwait or Qatar.
